We are a paltry 13 days away from the Season 5 premiere of Game of Thrones. Of course, by now, most of you have seen all four of the previous seasons, and are fully caught-up on the goings on in Westeros and Essos. However, if you’ve somehow forgotten all the details of past seasons (And by lovely I totally mean details that are soaked in the bloody viscus that is left of our hearts after our favorite characters die), then Lovereading has got the fix for you.

See what exactly a Game of Thrones Catch-Up machine is, after the jump

Over the last few weeks there has been an onslaught of Game of Thrones news, starting around the time the second trailer dropped during the surprise HBO Now announcement a few weeks ago. When you’re drinking from a fire hose like this, it’s hard to catch everything as it whizzes by your head, let alone think too deeply about the things people are saying about the show.

This news was tucked away in the middle of a wide-ranging interview with Benioff and Weiss, plus producer Bryan Cogman, in which they talked about where all the characters we knew and loved stood on the cusp of Season 5. I pulled it out at the time because it seemed like a crazy idea: “How could you cut Dorne?”

If you’re a Game of Thrones fan and happen to live near Tampa, Florida, it may be worth it to gather a bunch of your friends together, pile into a car, and drive to the Marshall Student Center’s Oval Theater on the University of South Florida (USF) campus tonight. In a twist of fate that is cruel to all those not situated in the Tampa area, USF students will get to seeGame of Thrones’ fifth season premiere nearly two weeks ahead of its official air date, the result of a Faustian pact between HBO and USF Housing and Residential Education. The two organizations have partnered to bring HBO Go to USF students. Why did HBO choose to partner with USF and bring this boon to students who already get to pursue their higher educations in a balmy paradise where seagulls sing them to sleep each night when other parts of the country have experienced freak snowfalls well into March? Because life is not fair. That’s why.

When the Queen says she would like a role on your show, it is perhaps advisable to find her one.

Helen Mirren, best known for…do I really have to list it all out? Let’s just go with “a long and storied career.” As one who crossed the divide from television to movies to playing the currently reigning Queen of England on Broadway, she’s one of the creme de la creme of the BBC stable from which Game of Thrones draws the bulk of its talent. During a recent interview with the Daily Mail, she admitted to watching Game of Thrones, and suggested that she wouldn’t mind a role on the hit show.

Canal+ has been a font of information throughout this off season. The premium cable channel, based out of France, is not a partner with HBO in the area–that would be Orange France–but they do have rerun rights. You wouldn’t know they aren’t the first run channel, though, the way they’ve been able to get photos and footage all throughout the filming of Dorne in Seville. Now they’ve got a brand new special that includes interviews with the cast (which are dubbed over in Spanish), plus brand new footage we haven’t seen yet.

The video, plus a breakdown of the new stuff we haven’t seen yet, is below.

The title may be poetic, but it’s also slightly misleading. James Hibberd of Entertainment Weekly doesn’t just spend 240 hours in Westeros, he spends a decent chunk of that time in Essos too. The huge cover story–the one we’ve been seeing all those quotes drop from over the last week or two–is finally online, and it’s as huge as you might expect. There’s everything from actor interviews to dialogue snippets to casual mentions of certain scenes that should probably have the words SPOILER ALERT hovering over them.

A couple of highlights from the magnum opus that we’re previously released are below…

The audiobook will be released tomorrow through Audible, one of the largest providers of audiobooks out there. Sun Tzu’s philosophies have often been boiled down to simple aphorisms, such as “all warfare is based on deception” and the well-known “know your enemy,” but the text as a whole, as it has been passed down and translated worldwide, has guided all manner of leaders—military and non-military alike. Of course, the text is preambled by Sun Tzu saying that not fighting is preferable to fighting; to me, that seems more like Varys’ game than Littlefinger’s, though the two are definitely cut from the same cloth. And no, Sun Tzu did not originate the phrase “chaos is a ladder.” As far as I know, that’s a Game of Thrones original.

Hey, Game of Thrones fans. The fifth season premiere is rapidly approaching, and we’re looking for someone to help us write episode recaps/reviews during the season—one per week, each one posted within a reasonable amount of time after the episode is over. Specifically, we’re looking for someone who enjoys the show but hasn’t read the books. Our office is packed with dorks who have devoured the books, which makes it impossible for us to provide an unvarnished perspective.

And the pre-season premiere interview barrage continues. This time, The Daily Beast sat down with Nathalie Emmanuel, who plays Missandei the former slave, to talk about the new season of Game of Thrones, among other things.

We are just a couple of weeks away from the Season 5 premiere of Game of Thrones. The hype is building each day, as interviews, red carpet affairs, photo-ops, and new teasers are spreading across the the Internet like wildfire across Blackwater Bay. There have also been plenty of rumors, some of which are too juicy not to discuss.

What follows, after the jump, are possible huge SPOILERSfor those who’ve not read the books. This is your warning, Unsullied, heed it well and enter at your own risk.

Harry Lloyd, the actor best known to Game of Thrones fans for playing Viserys Targaryen, the silver-haired, golden-crowned brother to Daenerys Targaryen (you could, but probably won’t, call him the Uncle of Dragons), will be participating in his own Ask Me Anything (AMA) session over at Reddit, under the subreddit /r/IAmA.

In advance of the rapidly approaching Season 5 premiere of Game of Thrones, Kit Harington sat down with The Irish Examiner to discuss a range of important topics, starting first and foremost with his hair. “I get slightly annoyed, being asked about my hair and the beard,” Harington said after the Examiner asked him about his hair and beard. “I like to think of myself as more than a head of hair. Maybe I’m not. Maybe I am just a hair cut.”